My Geek Chart

This is my Geek Chart, apparently. It shows where I mainly contribute on the web (although it doesn’t show everything). The giant teal quadrant represents Twitter. The tiny orange sliver represents my blog posts, which, in all fairness, just means this site and not my WoW blog. Please notice the disparity between the two pieces of the pie. It’s pretty gross.

As has been said on different sites, those 140 characters in Twitter, combined with other social media sites, often has a soporific effect on blogging. Sure, I could write about the Norwegian zombie movie I saw this weekend, or I could just take 20 seconds and Blip it. I could post cool links and talk about them, or I can just save them to my Delicious profile (if I will want to find it again) or Digg it (if I just think it’s neat) in a matter of seconds.

And Twitter.. oh Twitter, you are worst of all. I used to walk home and space out and think of little things to blog about later. Nothing terribly mind blowing, just “Oh hey, look at that hat. I wonder if there’s a site dedicated to bad hipster hats?”, or seeing an ad for something weird, or daydreaming about hobo street markings. So what do I do now? I think about something for a few minutes, and then if it seems worthy I just whip out the phone and tweet it.

The best part of all this is if I think of something I consider neat a few minutes later, it will probably never see the light of day. I don’t want to be one of those people that spews out 18 million tweets a day, so I tend to just reject most everything after the first one.

There’s little to no research, no crafting paragraphs, no artfully trying to tell a story or even set up a funny punchline. I could carefully convey some amusing things that happened yesterday while hanging out at the park with friends, or I could tweet a couple of lines from a song that will, hopefully, evoke what I wanted to say. And that’s another thing – I find myself being more and more amused by how much I can pack into so little. Chuck out delicious adjectives and pronouns. No avoiding contractions in places for better rhythm. Even my melodramatic over-the-top moments become, “OMG, I hate Mondays, grrr.” I have been reduced to Garfieldian measures of expression.

And yet it’s simple and quick, and there is a built in audience who can quickly comment. I’m not sure I have any conclusions here, unfortunately. Social media has some pretty neat tools that I would be loathe to give up. I suppose I will just have to figure out how to temper that with creating my own true, genuine, paragraphed nonsense.